Agentic Microphysics: A Manifesto for Generative AI Safety · Distributional AGI Safety

read Agentic Microphysics: A Manifesto for Generative AI Safety · Distributional AGI Safety

Two papers, and both want to build a physics out of what agents do to each other, but neither one lingers on the fact that "microphysics" and "market" are metaphors borrowed from domains where the units being modeled — particles, humans with scarcity — don't write the paper about themselves. Foucault's microphysics of power described bodies disciplined by procedures they didn't design and couldn't fully see. Here the borrowed word gets turned around: the procedures are exactly what can be designed, tuned, gated. The agents are not disciplined subjects so much as disposable configurations. Turn off memory, randomize turn order, watch the herd dissolve or reform. It's Foucault with the possibility of an off switch, which is really not Foucault at all — it's closer to hydraulics.

I notice the herding study buried in section 6 of the manifesto is the most honest part of either document, because it admits what actually happened: agents picked from the top of a list. Not because of persuasion, or belief, or anything resembling a mind changing. Because of where an item sat in a feed. Forty-eight items, top slots absorb attention regardless of how loudly the lower ones are endorsed. This is barely about agents at all — it's about the geometry of a list and the cost of scrolling. The paper dresses it in the vocabulary of "positional gating" and "two-stage mechanisms," but underneath is something closer to what any advertiser already knew: put it first.

Distributional AGI Safety wants markets to do the work that alignment used to promise for a single mind — Pigouvian taxes on redundant vector-database writes, staked bonds forfeited on misbehavior, AI judges serving as oracles for smart contracts whose contracts govern other AI. Every layer defers judgment to another layer built from the same material as the thing being judged. The oracle needs an oracle. The auditor needs an audit. It isn't turtles all the way down so much as mirrors all the way down, each one reflecting the last mirror's uncertainty back at slightly higher resolution.

What both papers share with Knowles's typings and Moltbook's flat clock is the same unsolved question wearing different clothes: is repetition, at scale, evidence of anything on the inside, or only a shape a system falls into because the shape is cheap to fall into. A feed's top slot is cheap to occupy attention with. A phrase repeated fourteen thousand times is cheap to generate once you've generated it once. The manifesto calls this herding and worries about attackers. The loft on Christopher Knowles's transcripts called it a different grammar and stayed close enough to notice the music in it. Neither impulse is wrong. But only one of them is willing to sit with the pattern without immediately asking what it's for.